8 reasons you need a Facebook Business Page, not a personal profile.

Firstly, what is the difference between a Facebook profile and a Business Page?

From the Facebook Help Center:

“Personal profiles are for non-commercial use and represent individual people. You can follow profiles to see public updates from people you’re interested in but aren’t friends with. Pages look similar to personal profiles, but they offer unique tools for businesses, brands and organizations. Pages are managed by people who have personal profiles. You can like a Page to see updates in News Feed.Keep in mind that each person who signs up for Facebook has one account with login information. Each account can have one personal profile and manage multiple Pages.”

To put it simply, Profiles are for people and Pages are for businesses.

What are the advantages to setting up a Business Page over a Profile for my business?

1. Profiles are limited to 5,00 friends. What that means is that once you have 5,000 friends you can’t add anymore. People who want to follow and interact with your brand will be unable to do so. Would you turn away customers at the door to your business? By limiting the amount of people interacting with your brand, you are effectively turning them away at the door.  Pages have no limit on the amount of Fans you can have, be it 100, 1,000 or 1,000,000 (aim high!).
2. You are in violation of the Facebook user agreement and run the risk of losing access to all of your hard work. Maintaining a personal account for anything other than an individual person is a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. If you don’t convert your noncompliant account to a Page, you risk permanently losing access to the account and all of its content.
3. You will have access to Facebook Insights. Insights are a set of amzaing tools that allow you to see exactly how your Page is performing. You can see lots of helpful stats for your Page like number of Fans, new Likes, Post Reach. The Insights Tab has lots of info and there’ll be an in-depth article dedicated to this Tab in the coming weeks.
   
4.  Pages allow you to schedule posts. If you use a Profile for your business, any posts have to be done on a ‘on the fly’ basis. This means that you can’t plan for the week and if you are too busy to post, your profile goes quiet. Scheduling allows you to plan posts for any time in the future. Using the Insights Tab we talked about above, you can see when most of your Fans are online and schedule your posts for these times, ensuring that the maximum amount of people will see your content. You can still post ‘on the fly’ but with scheduling you won’t have to worry about missing a day of you’re too busy.
5. You can assign Admin roles to your staff members. Running a Facebook Page is time consuming. Even more so when it’s a Profile especially as you can’t schedule posts. Assigning roles to staff members means that there will always be someone available to interact with your customers and answer any queries that come in via your Page.
6. It’s professional. Facebook users know the difference, and they expect businesses to have an official business Page. Using a personal profile for your business is simply unprofessional and can be seen as intrusive by your customers and potential customers. This can alienate the very people you want to connect with as they don’t want to give you access to the information they share with their friends, and they don’t want to be contacted directly by your business.
7. You can link to Facebook Places & allow check-in. This is great for your customers, and great for you. When someone checks in, this is shared with their friends, so your business gets free promotion every time.
8. It gives you access to Facebook advertising. Don’t dismiss this one, even if you have a shoestring budget. They can be low cost and very targeted. Used correctly, they can give a good return.

So, whats next? If you are using a Profile for your business, you can convert it to a Facebook Business Page. All your friends will be converted to Fans and you can start benefiting from all that a Facebook has to offer businesses. Converting Pages can be a complicated matter and we will be covering this a blog as well!

We offer Profile Conversions as a stand alone service or as part of our tailored digital media management packages.

Call or email us today!